This book will give you a practical overview of several methods and approaches for designing mobile technologies and conducting mobile user research, including how to understand behavior and evaluate how such technologies are being (or may be) used out in the world. Each chapter includes case studies from our own work and highlights advantages, limitations, and very practical steps that should be taken to increase the validity of the studies you conduct and the data you collect.

This book is intended as a practical guide for conducting mobile research focused on the user and their experience. We hope that the depth and breadth of case studies presented, as well as specific best practices, will help you to design the best technologies possible and choose appropriate methods to gather ethical, reliable, and generalizable data to explore the use of mobile technologies out in the world.

Table of Contents

PrefaceAcknowledgmentsIntroduction to Mobile User ResearchSensor and Usage DataObservations in the Field and in the LabDiary Studies and Experience SamplingAnswering "Did it work?": A Primer to Experimental Designs to Test for ChangeUsing Theory in Mobile User ResearchBig Challenges and Open QuestionsReferencesAuthor Biographies

About the Author(s)

Sunny Consolvo, Google, Inc.Sunny Consolvo leads Google's Security & Privacy User Experience team. Sunny and her team focus on usable privacy and security (e.g., understanding how people share their mobile devices). Sunny previously worked as a Research Scientist at Intel Labs Seattle where she investigated how to use mobile technologies to encourage health & wellness and to help people be more aware of the privacy implications of sensing and inference systems. She has also designed and evaluated tools to help people be more aware of what they expose when they use Wi-Fi, examined privacy implications of location-enhanced technologies, and developed technologies to help elders age in place. Sunny received her Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of Washington. She is a member of the Editorial Board for IEEE Pervasive Computing and the PACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable, and Ubiquitous Technologies. She became a Certified Information Privacy Professional (US) in 2013.

Frank R. Bentley, Yahoo!Frank Bentley is a Senior Principal Researcher at Yahoo, where he leads User Research for Yahoo Mail, Messenger, Flickr, and View. Frank's research identifies new product opportunities in communication and digital media based on findings from iterative user research and through the rapid prototyping and field evaluation of new concepts. For the past 12 years, he has taught a Mobile HCI class at MIT, which has also reached over 75,000 students on the EdX platform, and is currently teaching a new course, Understanding Users, at Stanford. Frank's first book, Building Mobile Experiences, focuses on designing for the novel opportunities that mobility provides by utilizing ethnographic research throughout the design and product development process.

Eric B. Hekler, Arizona State UniversityEric Hekler directs the Designing Health Lab at Arizona State University. His research focuses on individualized and "precise" behavior change for long-term health via digital health technologies and he is developing a research process called Agile Science. Examples of his work include NSF-funded research focused on developing mathematical models for guiding an intervention that determines an individualized "ambitious but doable" daily step goal to strive for each day. His Google-funded work focused on teaching individuals the fundamentals of behavior change and self-experimentation and giving them tools (e.g., home sensors and feedback) to allow them to self-experiment with behavior change techniques to optimize their health. Prior to ASU, Dr. Hekler completed his postdoctoral training at Stanford University and received his Ph.D. in Clinical Health Psychology from Rutgers University.

Sayali S. Phatak, Arizona State UniversitySayali Phatak is a Ph.D. student in the School of Nutrition and Health Promotion at Arizona State University. She works at the Designing Health Lab with Dr. Eric Hekler. Her research revolves around the design and development of personalized behavioral interventions using digital technologies. Over the last two years, she has worked on an NSF-funded project that uses a dynamical systems modeling approach to inform an app that can assign personalized daily step goals based on what it knows about the user. Her dissertation work is focused on systematizing self-experimentation research, particularly, developing a tool that can assist citizen scientists in designing data-collection protocols that are appropriate for their research questions.